Zig vs Rust. Which one is going to be future?

I think about pros and cons and what to choose for the second (modern) language in addition to C.

@programming@programming.dev

  • Ephera
    5·
    2 months ago
    1. Cargo is truly great, but it’s a mystery to me right now how I’m going to get it to work with certain packaging systems.

    Yeah, Cargo itself doesn’t deal with any of the bundling after the executable is built.

    For that stuff, the efforts are certainly still ongoing. There’s no grand unified tool yet.

    If you just want e.g. a DEB file, then you probably want this: https://crates.io/crates/cargo-deb

    But if you want to do more in CI, then there’s kind of three popular options that I’m aware of.

    • just: More or less a shell script runner, and kind of like make.
    • cargo-make: A lot of effort has been put into this, it’s certainly got a good amount of features, but personally not a fan, since it makes you write a custom TOML format and then ideally you should be writing a custom script language, DuckScript. You can also use Rust scripts with it, which we tried, but there was just no way of passing parameters between tasks.
    • cargo-xtask: This is not a tool, it’s a pattern, basically just build your own build tool. It does have its downfalls, you’re not going to build good caching into your own build tool, for example. But in principle I find this quite workable, as you get to write your CI code in Rust. There’s also more and more community-made libraries to aid with that.
    • arendjr@programming.dev
      2·
      2 months ago

      Great suggestions! One nitpick:

      But in principle I find this quite workable, as you get to write your CI code in Rust.

      Having used xtask in the past, I’d say this is a downside. CI code is tedious enough to debug as it is, and slowing down the cycle by adding Rust compilation into the mix was a horrible experience. To add, CI is a unique environment where Rust’s focus on correctness isn’t very valuable, since it’s an isolated, project-specific environment anyway.

      I’d rather use Deno or indeed just for that.